Thumbstar, the mobile games publisher, developer and distributor run by Gareth and Martin Edmondson, today announced that it has negotiated an agreement with Viva Red Limited and China Telecom to begin distributing Java and smartphone games in China.

China Telecom is one of the world’s largest mobile phone operators with over 130 million subscribers and a growth rate of 3 million users per month.

In a press release, Thumbstar CEO, Gareth Edmondson said:

“Our direct partnership with Viva Red Limited and China Telecom delivers a secure route to a previously unmapped and unprotected market. The terms of this landmark deal will enable developers across the globe to leverage existing and future IPs to a content-hungry audience, with the peace of mind that this state-backed partnership can provide the necessary copyright protection to encourage further market growth.”

Thumbstar was established in 2008 as an aggregator and publisher of mobile games. The firm now has internal development teams and offices in the UK, the Americas and Asia. It distributes games on all major mobile platforms, including BlackBerry, iOS, Android, and Windows phone.

Martin Edmondson is chief creative officer of Thumbstar, he previously established Reflections Interactive which later became Ubisoft Reflections Ltd and is best known for its development of the Driver series.

Gareth Edmondson worked with his brother at Reflections before leaving in 2011 and taking the role of Thumbstar CEO.

]]>http://www.vg247.com/2012/06/21/edmondson-brothers-thumbstar-moves-into-china/feed/0Edmondson brothers take Thumbstar board roles ahead of Newcastle expansionhttp://www.vg247.com/2011/11/23/edmondson-brothers-take-thumbstar-board-roles-ahead-of-newcastle-expansion/
http://www.vg247.com/2011/11/23/edmondson-brothers-take-thumbstar-board-roles-ahead-of-newcastle-expansion/#respondWed, 23 Nov 2011 14:00:23 +0000http://www.vg247.com/?p=217517GI.Biz is reporting that ex-Reflections bosses Gareth and Martin Edmondson have taken board roles at mobile studio Thumbstar Games. The pair, who were both ex-studio director and creative director at the Ubisoft-owned studio respectively, join as the company prepares to make an expansion up to Newcastle. Gareth comes in as CEO, while Martin, who had originally invested in the Liverpool-based company, will be chief creative officer. News of Gareth’s departure hit last week, but Martin’s exit was not publicised.
]]>http://www.vg247.com/2011/11/23/edmondson-brothers-take-thumbstar-board-roles-ahead-of-newcastle-expansion/feed/0Driver: San Francisco Shift mechanic drove coma plothttp://www.vg247.com/2011/08/19/driver-san-francisco-shift-mechanic-drove-coma-plot/
http://www.vg247.com/2011/08/19/driver-san-francisco-shift-mechanic-drove-coma-plot/#commentsFri, 19 Aug 2011 00:42:20 +0000http://www.vg247.com/?p=196968Driver: San Francisco’s unusual mechanics and “it was all a dream” plot were inspired in part by Google Earth.

Speaking to EDGE, Ubisoft Reflections founder Martin Edmondson said the game’s shift mechanic – by which Tanner jumps from one vehicle to the next – was the basis for the game’s narrative.

“The idea was: Google Earth live,” he explained.

“Everyone’s been on Google Earth and has had fun finding their house or where they work, but of course that’s a static photograph taken six months or a year ago. We wanted to be able to pull out and see the whole world running – all the cars driving round, all the people walking around and going on about their daily life – and you could be any car you want, you can be any person in that city.

“So we then set about designing a system that would be very reactive and fun, and part of the enjoyment and skill of playing would be the use of Shift.”

Edmondson said he didn’t want the reportedly delightful Shift mechanic to be a gimmick tacked onto the multiplayer, but to be built into the single player campaign – necessitating Tanner’s head injury, resultant coma, and the dream in which the game takes place.

“We did not want this to take itself too seriously. We didn’t want to be pretentious with it, because when you describe what’s actually happening it’s a tricky sell. So the first thing we wanted to do was to lighten the tone,” Edmonson explained.

“It also gave us an incredible amount of opportunity for humour. You can imagine Tanner shifting into a huge range of people in the city, and the passenger sitting next to him thinks it’s the same person, so Tanner has to very quickly work out who he is, what situation he’s in and find adequate responses. You find quite a lot of funny dialogue when he suddenly shifts into somebody and he doesn’t know and gets a broadside comment from the person sitting next to him.”

As such, Reflections recorded over 80,000 lines of dialogue for the hundreds of characters Tanner could meet on his psychic travels, even going so far as to write stories for these extras.

“There are also people on the streets that you just come across again, and their situation has progressed slightly – for example, splitting up with a boyfriend,” Edmonson said. “There are all sorts of things that are going on in the city.”

The full article through the link above is a great read.

Driver: San Francisco is due on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in early September, but the PC release has been delayed to later that month.

]]>http://www.vg247.com/2011/08/19/driver-san-francisco-shift-mechanic-drove-coma-plot/feed/3Get your shift together – Driver multiplayer hands-onhttp://www.vg247.com/2011/07/26/get-your-shift-together-driver-multiplayer-hands-on/
http://www.vg247.com/2011/07/26/get-your-shift-together-driver-multiplayer-hands-on/#commentsTue, 26 Jul 2011 05:49:27 +0000http://www.vg247.com/?p=189007In a little over a month’s time Ubisoft is hoping to restore the Driver brand to its former glory. VG247 spends time with the multiplayer and Martin Edmonson to see how it’s ticking over.

Driver: San Francisco

The sixth entry in the Driver franchise and the first home console title for five years.

Launches August 30 in US and September 2 in UK.

A few months ago we secured hands-on time with the single-player element of Driver: San Francsico and were introduced to the “shift” mechanic – a coma-dream facilitated superpower that counted The Matrix, Quantum Leap, and Google Earth amongst its inspirations.

At the time, we discussed its narrative application with game producer Marie-Jo Leroux and senior designer Jean-Sebastien Decant, who explained that, “Shift is a way of staying in the action by instantly taking control of any vehicle that you can see, without ever having to get out of the car,” and that “The story is built around the shift mechanic.”

That’s all good and well, but what neither of them really banged their drums about was how much more perfectly suited to multi-player this central feature is. Nor how it turns an otherwise inane game of ‘tag’ into a morish, exciting clang-fest in which a couple of button presses keep you at the centre of the explicit car-on-car action.

Tag, you’re it

And so, it came as something of a pleasant surprise to discover just how much pure and simple fun is to be had by mixing a playground game with high speed car chases. Indeed, by far the most popular mode experienced at Ubisoft’s recent press day was Tag, in which six players compete to reach one hundred points by being ‘it’ for as long as they can.

Whilst tagged any contact with another player, be it the daintiest of glancing blows or a full-on collision, transfers the tagged status and sees that player’s score begin to rise from where it left off the last time they were ‘it’. Locating the tagged player is a simple matter of activating shift, zooming to their position and then appropriating the nearest car with which to shunt them.

More sophisticated tactics reveal themselves providing you can ignore the compulsive desire to immediately flit from car to car like a champion Zebedee jumper. Take a few moments from the lofty vantage point that shift affords to plan ahead and you might try tracking your target’s route and shifting to a vehicle with which to head them off at the next junction, for example.

Other considerations concern the type of vehicle with which you grab the coveted tag marker, as doing so disables shift and locks you into your current vehicle. While it can be tempting to take control of the imposing bulk of a trailer-laden lorry for maximum head-on stopping power, you must think about what you’ll do that slow moving mass of metal once you’re ‘it’.

“Shift really comes alive in multi-player, doesn’t it?” I can only agree.

A quick getaway is desirable and, thanks to the damage modelling, acquiring point scoring status with too heavy-handed a collision will impede the performance of your current drive – something that those chasing you do not have to consider, as they’re able to shift at will to any other vehicle.

Our bouts of Tag last barely longer than six or seven minutes but, thanks to shift each bout is six or seven minutes in which everyone is involved, all of the time. Nobody that grasped the concept of shift is left lagging behind, frustratingly chasing an onscreen arrow and trying to track down their target.

At the end of every session, lips that had been pursed in concentration break into broad smiles as hands unfurl from tightly held controllers. As Martin Edmonson, creative director and overseer of the Driver franchise comments to me after a particularly closely contested round.

“Shift really comes alive in multiplayer, doesn’t it?”

I can only agree. But what other flavours of multi-player can we expect alongside the timesink that Tag is proven itself to be?

Meet The Cars – trailer

“There’s a total of eleven online modes and eight split-screen two-player modes,” Edmonson says. “The 11 online include the likes of capture the flag and base defence modes amongst others; modes that you wouldn’t traditionally associate with an online driving game and it’s the shift mechanic that’s allowed us to do that.

“It’s allowed for modes that you’d be more likely to find in a first-person shooter multi-player – that just wouldn’t really work without shift because if you crash and the rest of the guys are disappearing off into the sunset that’s not going to be much fun, right?”

There are more straight-laced, pure driving modes too because, as Edmonson is only too aware “We’re a driving game as well, so we want to make sure we offer that experience”, though whether any of these will match the out and out fun of those that feature shift remains to be seen.

Catch me if you can

The other mode that we see on the day is cops and robbers, in which one player who is unable to shift must reach four drop points on the map whilst the other players flit from car to car, turning each into a cop car in an effort to render the robber’s car immobile. It’s sinister: the way the cars around you shape-shift, flickering from harmless AI to the enemy in an effect similar to that of a civilian morphing into an agent in The Matrix films.

Edmonson confesses that they had intended to show other modes but that, with its short bursts of high action and easy to grasp nature, Tag is the mode everyone keeps coming back to. It should be noted that, in addition to its compulsive gameplay, the technical accomplishment of shift plays a significant role here. Whilst it’s fair to acknowledge that running a six-player session over a local network is at a lot less risk of experiencing lag or bandwidth issues, the seamlessness of shift’s multiple levels of zoom and the immediacy of its response is to be congratulated.

It may seem indulgent to wax lyrical about one, seemingly contrived, game feature but over the course of hands-on time with both the single and multi-player modes it’s proven itself to be every bit as key to the identity to Driver: San Francisco as the 200 miles of road, 120 licensed cars and the return Tanner.

The Comeback – cinematic story trailer.

The six-player demo pods remain some of the busiest of Ubisoft’s press day, perhaps simply because Driver: San Francisco’s multi-player is looking a lot more fun and entertaining than many might have expected – something that Ubisoft and Reflections should consider a major boon.

The game has been four years in development and Edmonson, especially, is ready for the world to see the fruits of his team’s labour.

“After four years in development we feel a bit like expectant mothers – we just really want to get it out there now.”

Driver: San Francisco launches for Mac, PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on August 30 in the US and September 2 in PAL territories. A separate Wii version, with a different storyline and gameplay focus, is also is the works with more details due at a later date.

]]>http://www.vg247.com/2011/07/26/get-your-shift-together-driver-multiplayer-hands-on/feed/1Driver San Francisco’s multiplayer is “chaotic”, “Matrix”-likehttp://www.vg247.com/2011/07/22/driver-san-franciscos-multiplayer-is-chaotic-matrix-like/
http://www.vg247.com/2011/07/22/driver-san-franciscos-multiplayer-is-chaotic-matrix-like/#commentsThu, 21 Jul 2011 23:16:07 +0000http://www.vg247.com/?p=188307Driver: San Francisco’s key feature – shifting from one car to another – has had some interesting implications for the game’s multiplayer.

“The shift feature has allowed us to design games that you wouldn’t normally associate with a driving game, like capture the flag and base defence,” Martin Edmondson, Ubisoft Reflections founder and creative director, told CVG.

“Obviously standard races and cop chases are in there as well. The games have been designed around the shift.

“So in a game like Tag or Capture the Flag, there’s a lot of shifting, people grabbing cars. It’s almost like this Matrix-kind of thing where a car will suddenly transform in front of you, because one of the other players has grabbed it.”

“It does become quite chaotic in some situations,” Edmondson said. “We’ve controlled the number of players on each game. Some games we don’t allow eight players, because they’re just too chaotic.”

Driver: San Francisco is due on Mac, PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in early September.

]]>http://www.vg247.com/2011/07/22/driver-san-franciscos-multiplayer-is-chaotic-matrix-like/feed/1Reflections: Driver: San Francisco “only a reboot” in technology termshttp://www.vg247.com/2011/05/05/reflections-driver-san-francisco-only-a-reboot-in-technology-terms/
http://www.vg247.com/2011/05/05/reflections-driver-san-francisco-only-a-reboot-in-technology-terms/#commentsThu, 05 May 2011 07:56:06 +0000http://www.vg247.com/?p=168685Driver: San Francisco creative director Martin Edmondson that the game is a reboot, but not for the series.

Edmondson told play.tm that it was a reboot in terms of technology and not much else.

“It’s not a reset or a reboot – it’s been called a reboot but it’s only a reboot in technology in focus, but it’s the same characters from Driver 1, 2, and 3 and the story takes place six months or so after the events of Driver 3,” he told the site.

He also insists that San Francisco will be a lot easier for someone new to the series to jump into, even though it takes place right after Driver 3.

“if you haven’t played Driver 1, 2, or 3 then it doesn’t really matter who Jericho is necessarily. If you have then there’s a bit of extra meat and flesh to the story. But he’s a bad guy, he busts out of prison, Tanner clearly hates, Jones is his partner, etc.

“It forms its own self-contained story. If you want to go off and do the research to find out why he’s in prison – well he’s been sentenced for the crime of shooting Tanner in Istanbul. That’s why Tanner hates him so much. Jones knows why Tanner’s so obsessed – why’s he so obsessed? Well, he met Jericho two games ago in Driver 2. So you can form that whole thing – we’ve been very sensitive to the timeline to make it all make sense, but that’s there for fans of the original.”

Read our recent impressions of the game here. Driver: San Francisco releases on September 2 in the UK for PS3, 360 and PC. A separate Wii version is also on the way.

]]>http://www.vg247.com/2011/05/05/reflections-driver-san-francisco-only-a-reboot-in-technology-terms/feed/1Bringing back Driver wasn’t a safe bet, says Edmondsonhttp://www.vg247.com/2011/05/03/bringing-back-driver-wasnt-a-safe-bet-says-edmondson/
http://www.vg247.com/2011/05/03/bringing-back-driver-wasnt-a-safe-bet-says-edmondson/#commentsTue, 03 May 2011 08:00:21 +0000http://www.vg247.com/?p=168002Driver: San Francisco creative director Martin Edmondson has said that bringing back the series wasn’t quite a 100 percent certainty at first.

Edmondson said he was brought in as a consultant at first on the vehicle handling and more.

“It wasn’t, because I left years ago and was doing all sorts of things unrelated to video games, and when Ubisoft bought Reflections, which used to be my company, and the Driver franchise, they said would I come and consult on the vehicle handling and also the early concepting meetings for the story and the premise for the game,” he told GI when asked if bring back the series was a safe bet.

“I was like, “Yeah, no problem at all,” so I came to a few meetings about the design basis for the game and how Shift would work, that kind of thing, and then gradually it snowballed into more and more work and then eventually they said would I mind being the creative director of the project.

“That was years ago… It’s difficult to say no when it’s your old company that you set up doing a new version of a game that you designed the original of, and it’s something which is a subject matter that’s very personal to you.”

Edmondson resigned from Reflections in 2004 after the criticism that followed the release of Driver 3.

Driver: San Francisco releases on September 2 in the UK. Read our recent impressions here.

Driver: San Francisco creative director Martin Edmondson has told VG247 that the big feature in the series’ new edition, known as Shift, would not have been possible on the last cycle of hardware.

Speaking to us in an interview following the first introduction to the new title, he said the new feature would only be possible in this generation of hardware, such as PS3 and Xbox 360 instead of PS2 and the original Xbox.

“Well, it certainly has in the case of this game because aside from the fact the graphics look prettier and the framerate is higher and we can have more cars because the consoles today are more powerful,” said Edmondson when asked if the latest hardware had affected what was coming out of the studio.

“The key thing with this game is that the Shift function itself – the way it works, the way you can instantaneously be across the other side of the city and that it has this whole city built and is instantly accessible – that’s something that would be physically impossible to do in previous generations of hardware.

He goes on to add: “So you can do a driving game that had a quarter of the detail, the same framerate wasn’t the same or a number of cars weren’t the same, the pedestrians on the streets and so on. But you simply couldn’t do a Shift ability on PlayStation 2 or the original Xbox.

“It doesn’t have the memory; it doesn’t have the capacity to stream at the rate we need it, that would be a physical impossibility.”

Get our full interview with Martin Edmondson here, and our full hands-on report of the game here.

So. The secret’s out – Driver: San Francisco is coming, and it’s coming this holiday season for PS3, 360, PC and Mac, with a separate Wii title on the way.

VG247 were in Newcastle at Ubisoft Reflections two weeks ago to check out the game before its reveal at Ubisoft’s press conference earlier tonight.

But could this be the return Driver has desperately been needing since Driver 3? Hit the jump.

Also, check out our interview with creative director of the game, as well as creator of the series and Reflections founder, Martin Edmondson here.

[All text by Johnny Cullen]

Reflections has gone through a rough couple of years since the release of Driver 3. It’s fair to say its taken a bit of a kicking. Parallel Lines in 2006 made the series a little better but after Driver 3, that really isn’t saying much, is it? The damage was pretty much done. But it’s a new start: with Ubisoft, not Atari, now in charge of the IP and the studio, it’s change with a sense of familiarity around it.

Welcome to San Francisco, Driver style.

To begin with, Driver: San Francisco takes place months after the end of Driver 3 (I’m not doing that Driv3r thing). If you completed Driver 3, you’d have seen both series regulars Tanner and Jericho in an Istanbul hospital: Jericho shot Tanner after a massive chase through the Turkish capital, with the latter flat lining in said hospital. Nothing was made clear of if he ever survived.

But he did. And so did Jericho. Not a massive lot of the story was discussed at Reflections during a brief 30 minute presentation by Reflections founder Martin Edmondson other than the characters returning, but one massive golden nugget was dropped. But more on that in a bit. As we begin, Tanner is in the hot-seat of a Dodge Challenger as you try following his partner Tobias Jones in a Porsche 911.

That’s right; Driver now has real-life licensed cars. 120 licensed cars to be exact, a first in the series, although only 20 were included in the demo as they were the ones officially confirmed for the game at the time. Some of these include Fiat 500s, DeLoreans, McLaren F1s, Bugatti Zondas and more.

As I attempt to follow Jones, Edmondson points me down to an alleyway. He tells me to stop in the alley, and this is where the megaton comes in. At some point in the game after a car crash – Edmondson didn’t go into details as to what exactly caused it – Tanner goes into a coma.

Because of the fact you are in said coma, you’ve gained the ability to use a new feature that’s not just new to the Driver series, but also a first for the open-world genre, known as Shift: something we’re introduced to once we pull into the alley. Shift allows you to basically jack any car you like that you see around San Fran by just pressing X, putting a reticule on it and pressing X again (the build we played was on PlayStation 3) and boom: you’re driving the car that you picked, all without actually getting out of the car on foot.

To keep players in the action during missions, you can use rapid Shift by using Square to keep Tanner in the rapid-pace action.

In fact, during this coma, Tanner thinks he’s picked up this super-human ability to take over people driving cars, thinking he’s actually had a lucky escape. You see, with him actually in the coma, it’s not him actually driving the car.

“When you Shift into a vehicle, you’re not just shifting into a metal box, you’re not just shifting into a vehicle and driving that vehicle,” said Edmondson in the demonstration.

“The vehicles are occupied by people, and when Tanner shifts into a car, he actually shifts into the person that is in that car. And he takes over that person. So there’s a passenger in the car, they’re not aware of anything having changed.

“They’re aware of their dad, their wife, their husband or whoever it is that’s sat in the driver’s seat may have started driving a bit crazy, but it’s still the person that they knew before, which opens up some interesting dialogue between the characters.”

But the player still “sees Tanner” to “maintain” a “constant connection” with the person playing the game.

Shift will cover the entire San Francisco area as well. For example, when you enter the mode, you basically see what’s happening on the street or road you are looking at. Pull back on R3 once and you see what must be an entire block. Pull back on R3 a couple of times and you get a full view of the city. Push forward on the right analog stick again on whatever area the reticule is on, and you will zoom straight into that area. You don’t get a full view of the city at first, but as you upgrade Shift as the game progresses, you’ll be able to.

It must be said, though, that it isn’t something that is a feature you can use unlimited. Another thing we should point out related to Shift is that there’s now a damage bar. Instead of damaging your car and it blowing up, effectively killing you inside, it takes you out of the car and takes you back into Shift to pick another car.

Driver 3 and Driver: Parallel Lines out-of-car experience wasn’t exactly a great one, but Reflection’s have taken lessons to heart over what D3 did, as Edmondson told us in an interview you can read here. But Shift is “a unique and original breakthrough” for the genre, according to him. And from the time we had with it, it we can honestly say you may start making a big deal about this.

But while Shift is the big massive thing in Drive: San Francisco, and with several returning key characters coming back for the game, Reflections does realise it needs to go back to its roots, including a rewritten physics model for Driver: San Francisco, as well as handling that’s similar to the original Driver.

So with Shift eliminating on-foot action in the game, the series has now returned to the racing feel that the first two titles in the series was well-known for, inspired by massive chase scenes in movies like Bullitt starring Steve McQueen, French Connection and the recent remake of The Italian Job, just to name a few.

And while there wasn’t a fair amount of chase scenes in the hands-on time that was had with the single-player portion – it was all about getting to grips with Shift – Edmondson was keen to stress the importance of key features in San Francisco that make chases exciting, things like the hills, the bendy streets, back alleys, busy streets and more. It was pretty much the reason why it was picked as the main location of the game. The heritage of those chase scenes in Hollywood movies really sends it home.

It’s also good timing, then, that Reflections has decided to bring back the director mode for the game: something which has been synonymous with the series since the beginning of the series, but was left out of Parallel Lines.

“Film Director is an integral part, for me, of the whole Hollywood car chase experience” says Edmondson. “It wasn’t in Driver 4, it didn’t feature the Film Director, but we’ve brought it back in an easier to use form in Driver: San Francisco to be able to create your own car chase movies.

“And it’s really good fun to mess about with,” he further adds. “A game like this is screaming out for that sort of feature because of the film style of the environment that we’re in and the types of cars and so on.

He was also emphasised that Driver San: Francisco was all about driving with four wheels. Simply put: no bikes and no boats in this one. But there will be buggies for the dirt tracks, which weren’t in the playable demo.

But there’s another first for the series as well: multiplayer. Split-screen and online multiplayer will be added to the game. Nine modes will be included with the final game, with two to six players bringing in the ranks. Only one mode was tried at Reflections, though, known as Trail Blazer, where players much slip in behind the slipstream of an AI controlled car to get points. First to get 100 points wins the round.

From what was played of Trail Blazer, it was seriously a hell lot of fun. It felt like old-school Driver, and then some.

Also included for Driver San Francisco’s multiplayer will be an XP system for players to level up. Oh, and it will all be Shift-based.

While it is understandable to be very cautious about a new Driver title these days – once bitten, twice shy, after all – there is some optimistic hope about San Francisco and its 208 miles of drivable roads. Tanner’s return, the introduction of Shift, San Fran itself, multiplayer and more. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

It still has a long way to go before its release this holiday season, but the first signs are good. Very good, in fact.

Let’s just hope that it pays off in the long run.

Driver: San Francisco releases this holiday season for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC and Mac. A separate Wii title will also be released at the same time. For our interview with Reflections’ Martin Edmondson, click here.

Driver is back. And it’s back in a big way. Reflections co-founder Martin Edmondson is keen to reflect that.

The just-announced title is coming back to San Francisco, with the location teased in a video last Monday, having been in the first title in the series.

Having not been around for the development of the last title in the series Parallel Lines – Edmondson resigned from Reflections after the backlash aimed at Driver 3 in 2004 – he’s back in the hotseat for development of the title as creative director alongside studio manager and brother, Gareth.

We spoke to Martin at Reflections’ studio in Newcastle a couple of weeks back. It’s a massive interview that covers most aspects, from the new feature Shift to the transition at new owner Ubisoft, how it’s handling the hardware of this generation, and how the series has returned to its original roots of a driving-only title.

You need to see it to believe it. Hit the jump.

[Interview by Johnny Cullen]

VG247: Obviously now, you’re bringing back Tanner, Jericho and all the characters, plus you’re having a real emphasis on driving again instead of coming out of the car and shooting. Do you feel that’s playing it safe?

Martin Edmondson: I don’t think we’re playing it safe at all, if you consider the Shift option. Shift is really quite out there, there’s nothing like that on any driving game at all.

And also, the mechanic that what it allows you to do in missions with a variety of using cars as tools and so on is when we started designing it was very high risk just because as soon as you do something that no one’s tried before and the rules change, being in a mission and being able to say “I’m going to come out of that mission and let it carry on, do something over here and then come back into the mission hall, swap to a different vehicle within the mission”, it introduces all sorts of potential design problems and questions, so I think it’s the opposite of safe.

Playing it safe would have been having the guy get out of the car and running around with guns. Problem is that there are so many games that do that now, that is not innovative at all, and some of those games are doing that very well. So it’s a steep mountain to climb as well.

VG247: Would you say San Francisco is the beginning of a comeback for the studio in some sort of way?

Martin Edmondson: In some ways. I mean we haven’t released a game for a long time, and we ran into difficulties with the previous publisher [Atari] where in terms of investment and so on in the product, Driver had started to become less of a big IP.

And now it’s under the window of Ubisoft, its got sort of financial backing to be there, and we’ve taken a huge amount of time to develop this game, so it’s nice to be able to sort of push it right back up there again.

Could you explain Shift in more detail?

Edmondson: It’s a new innovative feature for the game and where we come at it for the game is that Tanner has had a huge crash. That puts him into a coma, and the player realizes Tanner is now in a coma and this element of the game is playing out in his head.

But crucially, Tanner doesn’t realize that he’s in a coma, he thinks he’s gained kind of a super ability, and initially, this is something that scares him: being able to float above the world and instantly shift into any character in any car in the world and shift between them rapidly.

And that’s the way the gameplay works, shifting rapidly between vehicles and using vehicles as tools. So in taking down a getaway, for example, finding a big heavy vehicle, like an 18-wheeler rig, shifting into the driver of that rig and slamming the rig into the car we were chasing.

Would you feel that Shift would be a cheap and easy way to progress through the story?

Edmondson: Well first thing to remember is that all of the missions have been designed with Shift in mind. If we had designed all the missions and someone thought “oh, Shift is a good idea, try and integrate that”.

But it was designed from the ground up with Shift, so the difficulty is balanced based on the player’s ability to do that.

And there’s also an element of cleverness on the part of the player, thinking that they’ve used the vehicle in a clever way. Say for example that they’re based chased by a cop and they see an articulated car transport in front of it. They Shift into that and slam into the brakes and the cop goes flying over the car transporter and ends up on his roof.

That’s not a cheat, that’s a really cool way of having dealt with the cops and the missions are designed to deal with that.

Would Shift help avoid San Francisco help avoid comparisons to games like Grand Theft Auto, Crackdown or APB?

Edmondson: Well it certainly does. Driver: San Francisco is really nothing like Grand Theft Auto, certainly not now. You don’t get out of the car; you don’t run around, you don’t shoot guns and so on. So it certainly helps with that, and one of the reasons we’re really pushing the innovation on the game was that there are a lot of games doing that kind of thing.

Reflections as a studio, we’ve never been happy to completely [inaudible]. If you look at our previous games: Driver was the first open-city driving game, Driver 2 was the first driving game in a 3D city where you could get out of the car and steal other cars, Stuntman was an original concept, Destruction Derby was completely an original concept.

So we’ve always pushed the innovation in games, so for us, it was not wanting to do what everyone else was doing and also push the innovation to make the experience more interesting.

How has the transition gone from PS2/Xbox gen to this gen of PlayStation 3/Xbox 360? Has it affected the outcome of the content that’s coming out of the studio?

Edmondson: Well, it certainly has in the case of this game because aside from the fact the graphics look prettier and the framerate is higher and we can have more cars because the consoles today are more powerful. The key thing with this game is that the Shift function itself – the way it works, the way you can instantaneously be across the other side of the city and that it has this whole city built and is instantly accessible – that’s something that would be physically impossible to do in previous generations of hardware.

So you can do a driving game that had a quarter of the detail, the same framerate wasn’t the same or a number of cars weren’t the same, the pedestrians on the streets and so on. But you simply couldn’t do a Shift ability on PlayStation 2 or the original Xbox. It doesn’t have the memory; it doesn’t have the capacity to stream at the rate we need it, that would be a physical impossibility.

Driver 3 obviously was a massive egg in the face moment. It was pushed out with massive bugs and all that, you’ve all heard about it by now. Quite frankly, it was probably pushed out a bit too early. What lessons have you learnt from that since?

Edmondson: Well, there are some lessons that are very difficult to do very well. If your game is pushed out on a release date and the game is forced out on a release date, there’s not very much you can learn from that because that’s a publisher decision, and it’s not something that’s within the control of the developer.

What I would say is that it’s a situation that’s usually forced upon a publisher because of the financial situation that they’re in, and there was no secret about the financial situation that Atari were in at the time.

Ubisoft, for example, are focused primarily on quality and they have in the past slipped games on release schedule to maintain the quality of them. So those could be very hard commercial decisions, but in the long run, they are better commercial decisions because the quality of the game is maintained. You can destroy a franchise in one or two releases if you force out unfinished product, so you get short-term gain, but it costs you in the long run.

So the lesson to be learned there is a very obvious one, which is don’t release games before they are finished. But sometimes, these things are not something that you have any control over.

The other thing it taught us actually was to very much focus on what we considered to be the core experience. So there was a lot of stuff in Driver 3, and a lot of it we were proud of, I mean the driving sections we absolutely nailed and the city environments looked beautiful. But the bits with the out of car action and guns and so on were simply not finished.

Now when you’re looking at how you’re going to break down the team, how you’re going to focus on the product, the thing that we learnt from experiences like that is about focusing 100 percent on the core areas that you believe are what make the experience special and entertaining.

How have you found Ubisoft’s style compared to Atari since the buyout?

Edmondson: Well, we don’t to say anything about Atari, but it’s a very different company because Atari was at one time a very big company and then got into all sorts of financial difficulties.

One of the big differences at Ubisoft, apart from the fact they are financially strong, is that the key people that run the company are games players and know games and so there are a lot of people in the company that play games and know games.

And we don’t have the situation that we have had in the past with certain other publishers, not specifically Atari, but we have had in the past where guys come from the company and they are trying to say “we’ll cut this out or do this” and they know nothing about games, they don’t play games.

So it’s good to have people from the company that are proper games players, so they actually help then hinder the process.

Would you really say any games within the past five years have inspired San Francisco?

Edmondson: I would say honestly not in terms of gameplay or handling feel or anything like that because we very much go our own way with that.

Certainly we take stallion cues from things like the way that some visual effect we would have seen in a game and so on and these sort of particles in the air, they look nice. Bits of realistic effect, we should have something like that in Driver.

But certainly not in terms of the gameplay or the physics or the feel of the car. I mean Driver is still nothing quite like Driver to take cues from. There are even other driving that have car chases in them, but none of them do that Hollywood style TV car chase thing.

I was speaking to Gareth [Edmondson, Martin’s brother and studio manager of Reflections] and he was talking about how in one two hour stint he’d play one game and another game in the same genre – he used Blur and Split/Second as examples – the next day in two hours to decide what he’d like to properly dig into. What would say to players that want more reason to do that with Driver: San Francisco and another game of its type, and help make its choice on what it wants to play down the line?

Edmondson: I’m not entirely clear what your question is. Is it how I would sort of sell the game to somebody who I want to stop playing one game and play this?

Yeah. Gareth would probably explain it more in detail then I ever could. [laughs]

Edmondson: Well I think it’s a very, very different experience, Driver. For me, the thing that grabs me when I play the game, and you know when we’re developing here, when we enjoy playing games that we’ve been developing for years, that’s obviously we’re doing something right.

And for me, it’s the tactile feel of the handling and the rush, the adrenaline rush of being in a chase or a race on this sort of open street with very busy traffic and something that is quite unique to the game.

Other street driving games, they have something missing from them in terms of traffic density or this sort of tail-out slide handling, there’s always something that’s not quite there when compared to Driver from the car chase point of view.

Obviously Destruction Derby and Driver, they have this massive amount of destruction in them. Is that something you have a lot of fun playing around with in development, and then seeing the player with it once the game releases?

Edmondson: Yeah, definitely. I’m into movie car crashes and things like that. The very first movie I seen at the cinema was a Ryan O’Neil movie film, The Driver. One of the classic car chase films.

When I was a kid, I used to go with my Dad and watch real destruction derbies and banger racing and so on. And when the cars were finished in the race, I would jump over the barrier onto the track and run over and look at all the twisted metal and the battered cars. So it stems from a fascination with wrecking cars.

And during the development of it, for example, the sounds, we went to a wrecker’s yard and hired a big JCB, and we were picking up cars and dropping them on top of other cars to get the sound effects of the crunching metal sound.

Sounds like fun.

Edmondson: It was. We videoed it all. We’ve got video proof of this stuff.

Edmondson: Simtax was another one. There was Howling Wolf, The Blues Guy, Etta James and all sorts of things.

And Parallel Lines had a bit more of a mainstream feel to it compared to Driver 3. You had Yeah Yeah Yeahs, David Bowie and Blondie, to name a few. What is it in the soundtrack to San Francisco that’s going to make the player go “yeah, it’s unrecognizable, but it’s catchy at the same time?”

Edmondson: Yeah, it’s that sort of thing. We don’t have any tracks that are real radioplay. Not stuff that are in the charts, not stuff that most people would have on their iPods. Because if you want that kind of music, you may as well listen to your own choice of music.

This is to introduce people to new types of music that are fitting for the game. So it’s more along the model of Driver 3 then Driver 4.

Alright. Have you got any artists signed up yet for the soundtrack?

Edmondson: We have, but we’re not able to talk about which ones they are yet, I’m afraid. Totally separate communication…

Finally, small misc question: was there any temptation to make a silly title out of the Driver title, like an emphasis on the V for five?

Edmondson: Well thank God, no. I think there were plans to possibly do it with Driver IV with the I and V. Thank goodness we didn’t do that.

This is the end of it, once we go past V, there’s nothing else you can do with it. But no, there was no temptation from me, and I never heard it raised from within Ubisoft, thank God. So that never came up.

Driver: San Francisco releases this holiday season for PS3, 360, Mac and PC. A seperate Wii title is also coming. Read our hands-on of it here.